The Thread Killer

The rumour has it this whole deal is leading to Owens & Zayn vs. The Usos right? I’d be there for that.

Same reason Miro and FTR are barely on TV. You have to make room for the big stars like Daniel Garcia.

Quite honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it the tension has been defused because the whole bunch of them are gone. The locker room might just be glad all the sources of drama are gone. Plus it sounds like Jericho, Moxley and Danielson have been trying to step up and keep the atmosphere positive since the incident.

Even if he is…they’re pretty much the best team in the business right now and they’re at the top of their game. There is no excuse for keeping them off TV. If all the people who were annoying backstage and on Twitter were kept off TV, they wouldn’t have enough people to fill a two hour show.

No. He wrestled Claudio on Rampage a week or two ago. And FTR has a big match coming up on a NJPW show against Aussie Open. Dax has even broadly hinted on Twitter (as has Miro recently) that he’s not sure why FTR hasn’t been booked more. They just haven’t been because…reasons.

Four hours and no FTR? Seriously?

In the version of the fight I envision in my mind’s eye, Kenny and The Bucks were already crying when they confronted Punk. And once punches started being thrown, it escalated to full blown sobbing, accompanied by some whining and babbling about how mean and unfair Punk was being about the whole thing. I know that’s not how it happened, but that’s how I like to imagine it, mostly because unlike you, I do NOT like The Bucks.

They just added a bunch of Maple Leaf Gardens house shows to Peacock today. They also added a house show from Hamilton. Crazy thing is that I was at all of those Maple Leaf Gardens shows, the only one of those shows I wasn’t at is the Hamilton show. I remember that July 88 show because Terry Taylor was on the show and he wrestled twice. This was before the Red Rooster gimmick, and nobody in Toronto knew who the hell he was, for the most part. I knew Taylor from the Apter mags and from Bill Watts UWF show that my buddy recorded with his satellite dish…but I must have been the only one because as I remember the crowd was DEAD for both his matches. I distinctly remember him getting heckled, I should go back and check and see if my memory is accurate after all this time. They were both jobber matches, too. Weird. I remember the September 88 show because there were literally only two marquee matches on the entire show, Jake Roberts vs. Rick Rude and Hogan was supposed to defend the World Title against somebody big (I forget who) but whoever it was no showed, so the Main Event was Hogan against Haku. That show was terrible.

If Dennis Stamp taught us anything, it’s that if you’re not booked, you do not show up. But you must be ready. I hope he is in his backyard jumping up and down in his trampoline in his underwear, working out with dumbbells.

I remember seeing the original Survivor Series on closed circuit when it first began. Back when teams of five strived to survive. Great times.

As nice as it can be here, Nickelback would ruin it for you. They could ruin anything.

I know this sounds extremely pedantic and it is something Jim Cornette would say, but I have a problem with them announcing War Games months in advance. We all know Pro Wrestling is fake, fine. But for storyline purposes, should War Games not be the ultimate end to a feud between warring factions? It should be the participants demanding the match, not the other way around. There is no actual storyline going on right now that demands this match as the blow off being booked this far in advance. I assume it will be The Bloodline against some other group, I guess.

If you are talking bad about AC/DC I am demanding @sek69 ban you. And then I am going to petition Bolsonaro to have you publicly flogged, and extradited here to Canada, where you will be forced to sit in snow while listening to Nickelback for 50 years.

They were going to start playing the other Starship classic “We Built This City” but they didn’t want people to be injured when there was an inevitable stampede of fans trying to run screaming from the building with their hands over their ears, while sobbing in agony.

Back when Vince first left, I said I would give it three months until I expected to see if there was a significant change in the actual product, and I named Survivor Series as the goal date. I kept saying if things had not noticeably changed by then, then they probably are not going to change at all. Triple H is already way ahead of schedule, but if this is true it pretty much confirms that yeah, things have changed.

Even Dana White said it was a fact that the buy rate for UFC 203 was higher because of CM Punk. A lot of people bought that PPV specifically to see him, whether it was because they were fans of his or due to a serious case of schadenfreude. White admitted that is why he gave Punk a second shot. Any other fighter probably would have been banished to the untelevised prelims or released after that first fight. Dana White liked Punk personally (prickly asshole birds of a feather) and he respected his balls…but bottom line is, he knew Punk was getting eyeballs for the UFC. What would have been ideal is if there had been a season of The Ultimate Fighter happening around that time. White could have had his cake and eaten it, too. Remember what happened when Kimbo Slice was on TUF. Everybody knew that the odds were Slice was not going to make it in the UFC, but with that show they got him on TV for a while and drew ratings, without having him get his ass kicked. Up until his first fight, that is.

I have been to a couple small Indy shows outside during the summer, but they were under a tent canopy. They were fine. I have heard that outdoor shows are bad for crowd noise because the cheers just go up and the sound disappears…but those Indy shows were so small it wouldn’t have mattered. The most notable outdoor show I went to was the infamous “Big Event” which had somewhere around 60 -70,000 in attendance. I had floor seats on the aisle, and all I remember was that it was crazy cold. It was the end of August but I still remember freezing my butt off, I was shivering. I am glad I went, but that was what…36 years ago? You wouldn’t catch me dead in a crowd like that now, no matter who was on the card.

Unfortunately, no. I do have FITE and I use the app all the time (especially for AEW PPV’s) but for some bizarre reason, AEW is only available on FITE for “international” users and for whatever reason, Canada doesn’t apply. I suspect it’s because Dynamite is broadcast on TSN in Canada, but I am not sure. We don’t get the “Battle of the Belts” specials either. Come to think of it…I could probably get around that restriction with a VPN which I have been meaning to start using anyways.

Jericho recently mentioned that before the Turner deal came together, AEW had offers on the table from Showtime (?!) and Amazon Prime Video. I would personally love to see a major promotion get a deal with a streaming service like Prime. Let’s face it, streaming is the future and network and cable TV are eventually going to become non-entities. I am an MMA fan, and ONE FC just started a streaming deal with Prime and it’s awesome. They just did their first show a few weeks ago, the production was great and if you miss it or want to see it again, you can just go back and watch it no problem. And Prime is available on all platforms. Contrast that with AEW Rampage for example. That’s on TNT, which we can’t get here in Canada. It’s not available on any other channel. So if you want to watch Rampage in Canada, you have to stream it on the TSN website…but the TSN app is shitty, the VQ is inconsistent at best, and the app isn’t available on SmartTV’s or Gaming Consoles which means you have to watch it on your phone or tablet and try to cast it to your TV which buffers like crazy and is a giant pain in the ass. I often don’t bother. I would love to see AEW either start their own streaming service or go with a service like Prime. Especially because I would like them to get off their butts and get moving on a ROH show and make the ROH library available.

That should be billed as “Darby Allin and three other guys who probably shouldn’t be wrestling, for a variety of reasons.” But I’d still watch it.

My issue is that I don’t think this is as one-sided as some people would like to believe. There is no doubt that “The Elite” have a shit-ton of friends in the AEW locker room who support them, and can’t stand Punk. Fair play, I have no doubt that is absolutely true. But I also think there is a sizeble contingent in that locker room that does NOT like The Elite, and even if they are not siding with Punk, they are certainly sympathetic to his position in all this. Some people on Twitter are trying to paint that as pretty much FTR and nobody else, but I don’t necessarily think that’s true. A lot of those guys are probably smart enough to realize that if they come out against the EVP’s, it could go very badly for them politically. I have seen it said, and I do believe it, that Punk is the first guy who actually has the juice to stand up publicly to The Elite, but there are plenty of others who would have liked to have done so before all this mess. Just guessing here, but I am sure there is probably a fairly large third group of guys who really don’t give a shit about any of this and just want the whole conflict to go away so they can work in peace. Those are probably the guys I feel the most sympathy for.

I don’t get how his beef was shot down. Everybody knows The Elite talks to Meltzer all the time. That’s a fact, not even Meltzer denies it. The Observer reported that Cabana was going to ROH basically at the behest of The Young Bucks and because of heat between Punk and Cabana. It’s literally right here for all to see. I don’t see where it takes a massive leap of reasoning to see where Punk is coming from.

Oh, well if Bix said it, then it must be right.

And Don Callis. And he was good buddies with Joey Ryan. It’s like the sex pest HOF.

You know Kenny really must have said it when even Meltzer is confirming he said it. He actually stood up in front of the entire roster and said that he wouldn’t have hired 80% of them. The current spin on the comment is that it was intended to be a joke (perhaps aimed at Will Osprey) but obviously a lot of people didn’t think it was funny, and it certainly didn’t go along with the overall intention of the meeting, which was to smooth out backstage tension and improve roster morale. Way to read the room, you dork.